DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Google’s (Public, NASDAQ:GOOG) future envisioning 10 million servers.

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

October 20th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

Google’s Jeff Dean was one of the keynote speakers at an ACM workshop on large-scale computing systems, and discussed some of the technical details of the company’s mighty infrastructure, which is spread across dozens of data centers around the world.

In his presentation (link via James Hamilton), Dean also discussed a new storage and computation system called Spanner, which will seek to automate management of Google services across multiple data centers. That includes automated allocation of resources across “entire fleets of machines.”

Going to Jeff Dean’s presentation, I found a Google secret.

Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems

Designing Efficient Systems Given a basic problem definition, how do you choose the "best" solution? • Best could be simplest, highest performance, easiest to extend, etc. Important skill: ability to estimate performance of a system design – without actually having to build it!

What is Google’s assumption of where computing is going?

Thinking like an information factory Google describes the machinery as servers, racks, and clusters. This approach supports the idea of information production. Google introduces the idea of data centers being like a computer, but I find a more accurate analogy is to think of data centers as information factories. IT equipment are the machines in the factory, consuming large amounts of electricity for power and cooling the IT load.

Many people have quoted the idea “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” But a more advanced concept that Google discusses is “If you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t do decent back-of-the-envelope calculations!”

This ideas being discussed are by a software architect, but the idea applies just as much to data center design. And, the benefit Google has it has all of IT and development thinking this way.

And here is another secret to great design. Say No to features. But what the data center design industry wants to do is to get you to say yes to everything, because it makes the data center building more expensive increasing profits.

So what is the big design problem Google is working on?

Jeff Dean did a great job of putting a lot of good ideas in his presentation, and it was nice Google let him present some secrets we could all learn from.